Try free for 30 days
-
Better Living Through Birding
- Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
- Narrated by: Christian Cooper
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
The Home Place
- Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
- By: J. Drew Lanham
- Narrated by: J. Drew Lanham
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".
-
Soil
- The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
- By: Camille T. Dungy
- Narrated by: Camille T. Dungy
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet.
-
Wild Life
- Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World
- By: Rae Wynn-Grant
- Narrated by: Rae Wynn-Grant
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wild Life follows Rae on her adventures and explorations in some of the world’s most remote locales. Hers is a story about a nearly twenty-year career in the wild—carving a niche as one of very few Black female scientists—and the challenges she had to overcome, expectations she had to leave behind, and the many lessons she learned along the way.
-
What Is Life?
- With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
- By: Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose - foreword
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.
-
-
An interesting read.
- By Anonymous User on 29-12-2020
-
Church of the Wild
- How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred
- By: Victoria Loorz
- Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it—and calling it church.
-
-
To remember and belong
- By Anonymous User on 11-12-2022
-
Find More Birds
- 111 Surprising Ways to Spot Birds Wherever You Are
- By: Heather Wolf
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 4 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seeing more birds than you ever imagined and witnessing exciting avian drama is possible-whether you're on the go or in your own neighborhood, local park, or backyard. As Heather Wolf explains, it all comes down to how you tune in to the show happening around you, the one in which birds-highly skilled at staying under the radar-are the stars. In Find More Birds, Heather shares her very best tactics.
-
The Home Place
- Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
- By: J. Drew Lanham
- Narrated by: J. Drew Lanham
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina - a place "easy to pass by on the way somewhere else" - has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, listeners meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be "the rare bird, the oddity".
-
Soil
- The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
- By: Camille T. Dungy
- Narrated by: Camille T. Dungy
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet.
-
Wild Life
- Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World
- By: Rae Wynn-Grant
- Narrated by: Rae Wynn-Grant
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wild Life follows Rae on her adventures and explorations in some of the world’s most remote locales. Hers is a story about a nearly twenty-year career in the wild—carving a niche as one of very few Black female scientists—and the challenges she had to overcome, expectations she had to leave behind, and the many lessons she learned along the way.
-
What Is Life?
- With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
- By: Erwin Schrödinger, Roger Penrose - foreword
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.
-
-
An interesting read.
- By Anonymous User on 29-12-2020
-
Church of the Wild
- How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred
- By: Victoria Loorz
- Narrated by: Natasha Soudek
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it—and calling it church.
-
-
To remember and belong
- By Anonymous User on 11-12-2022
-
Find More Birds
- 111 Surprising Ways to Spot Birds Wherever You Are
- By: Heather Wolf
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 4 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seeing more birds than you ever imagined and witnessing exciting avian drama is possible-whether you're on the go or in your own neighborhood, local park, or backyard. As Heather Wolf explains, it all comes down to how you tune in to the show happening around you, the one in which birds-highly skilled at staying under the radar-are the stars. In Find More Birds, Heather shares her very best tactics.
-
A Most Remarkable Creature
- The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey
- By: Jonathan Meiburg
- Narrated by: Jonathan Meiburg
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
An enthralling account of a modern voyage of discovery as we meet the clever, social birds of prey called caracaras, which puzzled Darwin, fascinate modern-day falconers, and carry secrets of our planet's deep past in their family history.
-
-
A Wonderful Journey
- By Ken Davis on 28-03-2023
-
Walk Ride Paddle
- A Life Outside
- By: Tim Kaine
- Narrated by: Tim Kaine
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2019, Tim Kaine—Virginia Senator and former Democratic vice presidential candidate—commemorated both his sixtieth birthday and his twenty-fifth year in public office by undertaking a three-part journey across the Virginia landscape as he hiked, cycled, and canoed across the state. His chronicle of the journey became an organic reflection of the extraordinary events occurring across America during that time, including impeachment trials, a global pandemic, growing racial protests, the January 6th attack on the Capitol, and more.
-
War Is a Racket
- By: General Smedley Darlington Butler
- Narrated by: William Dougan
- Length: 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
War Is a Racket is Marine General Smedley Butler's classic treatise on why wars are conducted, who profits from them, and who pays the price. Few people are as qualified as General Butler to advance the argument encapsulated in his book's sensational title. When War Is a Racket was first published in 1935, Butler was the most decorated American soldier of his time. He had led several successful military operations in the Caribbean and in Central America, as well as in Europe during the First World War.
-
The King of Diamonds
- The Search for the Elusive Texas Jewel Thief
- By: Rena Pederson
- Narrated by: Erin Dion
- Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a string of high-profile jewel thefts went unsolved during the Swinging Sixties, the press dubbed the elusive thief the King of Diamonds. Like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the King was so bold that he tip-toed into the homes of millionaires while they were home, hiding in their closets and daring to smoke while they were sleeping. Rena Pederson, then a young reporter with UPI, started following the elusive thief while she managed the night desk. With gymnastic skill, he climbed trees and crawled across rooftops to take jewels from heiresses, oil kings, corporate CEOs.
-
Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
- By: Toko-pa Turner
- Narrated by: Toko-pa Turner
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Feel like you don’t belong? You’re not alone. The world has never been more connected, yet people are lonelier than ever. Whether we feel unworthy, alienated, or anxious about our place in the world, the absence of belonging is the great silent wound of our times. Most people think of belonging as a mythical place, and they spend a lifetime searching for it in vain. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all? What if it’s a skill that has been lost or forgotten? With her signature depth and eloquence, Toko-pa maps a path to belonging from the inside out.
-
-
Hard to listen to
- By Anonymous User on 12-06-2021
-
The Great Displacement
- Climate Change and the Next American Migration
- By: Jake Bittle
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Over the next fifty years, millions of Americans will be caught up in this churn of displacement, forced inland and northward in what will be the largest migration in our country’s history. The Great Displacement compassionately tells the stories of those who are already experiencing life on the move, while detailing just how radically climate change will transform our lives—erasing historic towns and villages, pushing people toward new areas, and reshaping the geography of the United States.
Publisher's Summary
Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up.
"Wondrous . . . captivating.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Immense World
Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-oldracial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.
In Better Living Through Birding, Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.
Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.
Bird audio provided by Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Cover images: Christian Cooper by Brittainy Newman / The New York Times / Redux, bird and sky / Getty Images
Critic Reviews
“Christian Cooper’s book is every bit as wondrous and captivating as the birds he so adores—a joyous tour across subcultures and continents, and a masterful account of a life full of song, full of heart, and fully lived.” (Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of An Immense World)
“An uplifting and inspiring read. Christian Cooper is a national treasure.” (Van Jones, New York Times bestselling author and host of The Van Jones Show)
“Utterly captivating, a marvel of storytelling . . . Christian Cooper’s memoir is tender, honest, funny, wise, poignant, piercing, and infused with brilliant observations on the nature of birds, humans, and his own extraordinary personal journey.” (Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds)
What listeners say about Better Living Through Birding
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- MEW
- 07-09-2023
Just stick to the birds
Wanted a book about birds and bird calls. Too much info re personal life. Try again as you obviously know enough and we need education.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!